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Summary: Chapter 8: The Result: White Fragility

Whites often take feedback about their behavior personally, because they are used to seeing the world on an individual basis. White people also have trouble recognizing their racism, because they grew up experiencing their racially based advantage as normal. Even if a white person claims to be color-blind or not racist, attitudes born of white supremacist socialization, have a way of surfacing. When a Black person works up the courage to point out racist behavior, the white person usually becomes defensive. The response from actress Helen Mirren when asked if she felt the Oscars were behind the times for failing to nominate a single Black actor in 2016 was that it was random circumstance. This sort of reply distances the individual from the perceived racial inequity and denies their personal responsibility. Instead of being about overcoming the racist structures that normalize unequal behavior, the conversation becomes about the white person defending their racist behavior as unintentional. This is white fragility. 

This immediate defensiveness also stems from the fact that white children do not learn the historical aspects of European Americans’ racial dominance and their place in perpetuating this structure. Nor are they given the tools to deal with the tension of racial inequity when it arises. In a diversity training led by DiAngelo, a white woman was so upset by the feedback she received about the impact some of her statements had made on several people of color in the room, that she felt she was having a heart attack. The conversation then centered on the white woman’s health and emotional response, rather than how her statements had been seen as racist.

Many white people may argue that they have never benefitted from white supremacy because of their particular backstory. Many white people are also disadvantaged within white society. They may have been poor, had less access to education, or were ostracized in some way, and worked hard to overcome these disadvantages and achieve a higher status in white society. But whatever their individual struggle, on the whole, white society has actively worked to keep Black people from having equal access to housing, education, health care, and jobs. When white people redirect the conversation to be about them, the wider conversation about identifying and counteracting the impacts of a racist society, never happens. In this way, white fragility maintains the status quo of white supremacy. 

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